External service providers provide many of the services that businesses incorporate and use on daily basis. Accounting, inventory management, and logistical systems are typically obtained from external service providers as opposed to being developed in-house as custom proprietary systems. The reliance on external services allows businesses to immediately fill a void and do so with lower overall cost that custom developing each and every system put in use by the business.
However, many external services are created for general application. Accordingly, the external services provide a baseline set of functionality that does incorporate business specific information. The business specific information is typically not accessible because the business systems storing the business specific information are closed or were never designed for integration with these external services or external systems providing the services. The business can then incur the very overhead and expense it sought to avoid initially and customize the external services for their own business needs or customize their own internal systems to become compatible with the external services.
Risk management is one such example of an external service. Businesses obtain credit reports from credit reporting agencies such as Dun & Bradstreet®. The credit reports provide a risk assessment of different entities.
The businesses rely on the risk assessment of different entities provided in the credit reports in order to gain insight as to which entities a business should transact with and on what terms. In particular, each business generates a credit policy based on the credit reports. The credit policy guides the business in determining whether or not to assume the risk of transacting with an entity identified in a credit report. Businesses that perform a poor risk assessment as a result of misuse or underuse of credit report information or simple inexperience in performing a risk assessment can result in the business having to write off bad debt from transactions with entities that do not pay on time or at all.
If, however, the credit reporting agency had access to business specific information, the credit reporting agency could customize the credit reports to provide not only the risk assessment of different entities, but also a best practices selection of entities with which the business should transact with and specific transaction terms to minimize the business's risk. In other words, the external service provider could customize the service for each business and provide a significant value add.
Nearly every business has a bookkeeping or accounting system. These systems track financials of a given business including clients and transactions conducted with those clients. This business specific information, if made accessible to external service providers, could be used to customize the risk management services beyond simple credit reporting. In particular, providing access to this business specific information would enable external service providers to provide customized risk assessments and credit policies for a business for minimizing or eliminating bad debt.
There is therefore a need to access business systems in order to integrate business specific information from various business systems with systems of the external service providers. There is then a need to customize external services that are provided to a business based on the business specific information that is obtained from opening access to the various business systems.